Sdu-Tools

Our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, now includes a very large number of tools, with procedures, functions, and views. One tool that was added a while back is ScriptAnalyticsView.

When we build BI systems, we create a data warehouse with tables that are structured as cleansed versions of the incoming data, and with strong referential integritty and consistency.

When we expose those tables to external BI tools like Power BI, Analysis Services, etc. we limit those tools to a series of views that we create. Generally we put them in a schema called Analytics, but it could have any name.

2025-04-20

SDU Tools: Extracting URL components in SQL Server T-SQL

Our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, now includes a very large number of tools, with procedures, functions, and views. One common request that we’ve had, is that users need to be able to extract the component parts of a URL.

In the example above, you’ll see that we have added a table-valued function called URLComponents.

It supports protocols, host names, path names, search terms, and anchors.

In case, you need to process individual components, to help with that, we’ve added a number of scalar functions: URLToProtocol, URLToHostName, URLToPathName, URLToSearchTerms, and URLToAnchor.

2025-04-12

SDU Tools: Extracting file path components in SQL Server T-SQL

Our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, now includes a very large number of tools, with procedures, functions, and views. One common request that we’ve had, is that users need to be able to extract the component parts of a file path.

In the example above, you’ll see that we have added a table-valued function called FilePathComponents.

It supports both drive paths and UNC paths.

In case, you need to process individual paths, to help with that, we’ve added a number of scalar functions: FilePathToFileName, FilePathToFolderName, FilePathToFileExtension. You can see them in action here:

2025-04-10

SDU Tools: Date Difference without Sundays in SQL Server T-SQL

Our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, now includes a very large number of tools, with procedures, functions, and views. A while back, we added a tool to do date difference without counting weekends. Someone asked for one that just excludes Sundays, so we added a tool called DateDiffNoSundays.

The procedure takes two parameters:

@FromDate - the starting date @ToDate - the ending date

Find out more

You can see it in action in the main image above, and in the video here:

2025-04-06

SDU Tools: List Columns and Data Types in SQL Server Views

Our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, now includes a very large number of tools, with procedures, functions, and views. I do a lot of reviewing of database designs and one thing I always check for is the use of data types, including when they’ve been used in views. So we added a tool that can help to find these. It’s called ListViewColumnsAndDataTypes.

The procedure takes four parameters:

2025-03-31

SDU Tools: Reset Sequence using SQL Server T-SQL

Our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, now includes a very large number of tools, with procedures, functions, and views. Users that are new to working with sequences often don’t have simple options for resetting them back to a specific value. Many business intelligence ETL or ELT processes need to have a way to do this. So we added a tool that can help. It’s called ResetSequence.

The procedure takes three parameters.

2025-03-13

SDU Tools: List User-Defined Data Types in SQL Server

Our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, now includes a very large number of tools, with procedures, functions, and views. I do a lot of reviewing of database designs and one thing I always check for is the use of user-defined data types. I’ve had situations where these have caused me substantial issues. So we added a tool that can help to find these. It’s called ListUserDefinedDataTypes.

The procedure takes one parameter.

2025-03-09

SDU Tools: List and Retrust Untrusted Foreign Key Constraints in SQL Server

Our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, now includes a very large number of tools, with procedures, functions, and views. I do a lot of reviewing of database designs and one thing I always check for is foreign key constraints that are not currently trusted. So we added a tool that can help to find these. It’s called ListUntrustedForeignKeys.

The procedure takes three parameters.

@DatabaseName is the database to process @SchemasToList is a comma-delimited list of schema names to process @TablesToList is a comma-delimited list of table names to process

2025-02-27

SDU Tools: List and Retrust Untrusted Check Constraints in SQL Server

Our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, now includes a very large number of tools, with procedures, functions, and views. I do a lot of reviewing of database designs and one thing I always check for is check constraints that are not currently trusted. So we added a tool that can help to find these. It’s called ListUntrustedCheckConstraints.

The procedure takes three parameters.

@DatabaseName is the database to process @SchemasToList is a comma-delimited list of schema names to process @TablesToList is a comma-delimited list of table names to process

2025-02-25

Our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, now includes a very large number of tools, with procedures, functions, and views. A request that I had a while back was to have a function that returned what type of SQL Server the code was being executed on. So we added the SQLServerType function.

It takes no parameters.

As this is an enumerated value, it’s just a CASE statement.